Paul’s review of Fifty Key American Films (Routledge Key Guides) > Likes and Comments
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yikes++
That run-on sentence in the quote you featured earned the book a solid one star.
yes - that guy is the worst but there are a couple of other contributors who still manage to write in English and not filmprofessorese.
There's something about film criticism that attracts a particular kind of Pseuds Corner wankiness. Maybe that it took so long to get any credit and still gets people giving it the sidelong glance and saying oh it's too popular to be really serious
also they all seem to have fallin into the semiotic/deconstruction/Baudrillard/ poststructuralism/Barthes/and still a lot of Freud/etc pit, from whence they cannot escape like those people in Woman in the Dunes, a perfect metaphor for film criticism
And then the academics wonder why they get no respect....
Is this English? I recognise individual words but are they just randomly chosen to stand together and mean nothing?
In my team, younger writers are handed 'recommended unreadings' to understand how people can use a lot of words to say nothing, to learn how they can sharpen the message in whatever they write. This is a fine example. Thanks, Paul!
I was a university English professor and I’m still recovering from sentences like this one. Years of therapy have helped.
People will say that the quotation you provide is a run-on sentence. It's not. It's grammatically correct, & as a retired liberal-arts academic I understand it perfectly. But it doesn't need to be so ostentatiously complex. The author is showing off, & the sentence's real problem is that it's bullshit. Which I think is your point.
indeed it was - you can make all the points these academics make about movies without lapsing into jargon or abusing the English language.
Very apt reference to woman in the dunes, one of my favourite films ever!
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That run-on sentence in the quote you featured earned the book a solid one star.
yes - that guy is the worst but there are a couple of other contributors who still manage to write in English and not filmprofessorese.
There's something about film criticism that attracts a particular kind of Pseuds Corner wankiness. Maybe that it took so long to get any credit and still gets people giving it the sidelong glance and saying oh it's too popular to be really serious
also they all seem to have fallin into the semiotic/deconstruction/Baudrillard/ poststructuralism/Barthes/and still a lot of Freud/etc pit, from whence they cannot escape like those people in Woman in the Dunes, a perfect metaphor for film criticism
And then the academics wonder why they get no respect....
Is this English? I recognise individual words but are they just randomly chosen to stand together and mean nothing?
In my team, younger writers are handed 'recommended unreadings' to understand how people can use a lot of words to say nothing, to learn how they can sharpen the message in whatever they write. This is a fine example. Thanks, Paul!
I was a university English professor and I’m still recovering from sentences like this one. Years of therapy have helped.
People will say that the quotation you provide is a run-on sentence. It's not. It's grammatically correct, & as a retired liberal-arts academic I understand it perfectly. But it doesn't need to be so ostentatiously complex. The author is showing off, & the sentence's real problem is that it's bullshit. Which I think is your point.
indeed it was - you can make all the points these academics make about movies without lapsing into jargon or abusing the English language.
Very apt reference to woman in the dunes, one of my favourite films ever!
